Thursday, August 28, 2008

Space Rangers 2 - Rise of the Dominators

This game was released in North America in March of 2006 with reviewers giving it a 84/100, it can still be purchased thru Stardock.

This game is mostly a lot of fun.

Now what I mean by that is the part that I really enjoy is flying my ship around, fighting other ships, and doing some of the missions.

Now the flying part, its pretty simple, you have a 2D map and you just click where you want to go with in a system, you can also bring up your star map and fly between systems. The only thing you need to consider when flying between systems, is how far will my engine take me, and how much fuel do will I need. Even this is fairly simple to figure out, when your star map is open you will see a green ring, that will show you how far you can fly, and if you want to fly to a system beyond your reach, the game simply won't let you.

One thing to be careful of thou, if your trying to get all the way across the map, try not to do it in the largest jump as possible, you never know when a system will get attacked, and there is nothing worse than being stuck in the middle of a fight with no fuel and no way out. Two ways to avoid this is either take smaller system jumps, or carry extra fuel along. However if you do find yourself with no way out, either the closest systems are all under control of the dominators, or you are to far away, try and land on a unihabitanted planet. You can than wait till the dominators are defeated, or one of the closer systems is liberated so you can jump to safety. You may also want to lift off from the planet once in a while to see if there are fuel canisters from destroyed ships or help in mopping up the last of the dominators.

Now fighting other ships is also very simple, and a little annoying. It simple in all that you do is select your weapons and point at the ship you want to attack. It's annoying because that's all you do, you have no control over how your ship maneuvers or how it attacks, and sometimes you will wonder why is the ship doing that? So most battles come down to, do I have a better ship than he does.

Flying missions is another almost fun part of the game, and when I say almost fun I mean that some of the mission are fun and interesting and some ore tedious and make no sense at all in a space sim. Missions like, we need you to track this ship down and destroy it, we need you to get this to planet x asap, those missions I enjoy especially the flavour text that goes along with them. However managing and building a ski resort, starting a band and the other nonspace missions are tedious at best and down right annoying at worst.

One other mission type is the where you have to fight the dominators in a rts type game, which while interesting after a while it becomes more and more frustrating. You can play this part as a traditional RTS or you can take control of the robots you build and play them like a FPS. I found this part annoying since it seems the computer can pump out as many robots as fast as possible that you may find yourself quickly overwhelmed.

Now there is one part that I haven't gotten to, and that's apparently a space battle between you and the Keller which is suppose to happen inside a black hole.

For now I'm just going to fly my ship around shoot down pirates and the dominators and just have fun.

RGX

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